Nursing personnel attitudes towards suicide: the development of a measure scale.

OBJECTIVE To describe the construction of the Suicide Behavior Attitude Questionnaire (SBAQ) which measures attitudes of nursing personnel towards suicide, and verify attitude differences among these professionals. METHODS The Suicide Behavior Attitude Questionnaire comprises 21 visual analogue scale items (beliefs, feelings and reactions on suicidal patients) selected from a pool of attitude statements generated by focal groups and experts' judgement. The questionnaire was completed by 317 nursing professionals who worked in a teaching hospital. Factor analysis and internal consistency were calculated. RESULTS Three interpretable factors were extracted, accounting jointly for 40% of the total variance: Feelings when caring for the patient, Professional Capacity and Right to Suicide, comprising 7, 4 and 5 items, respectively. The Cronbach's alpha coefficients were 0.7, 0.6 and 0.5, respectively. Greater Professional Capacity was reported by nursing assistants and those who had already took care of suicidal patients. The belief that a person does not have the right to commit suicide was stronger among older professionals, those who had never taken care of suicidal patients, those who had a family history of suicide, those who were Protestants and that used to go more frequently to church services. CONCLUSIONS The Suicide Behavior Attitude Questionnaire proved to be user-friendly and quite a simple instrument to assess attitude towards suicide among nursing personnel.